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12/27/2016

The experience of reading is always the experience of language, even though many readers don’t stop often enough to acknowledge this. We read artfully arranged words that in works of literature create “meaning” only relative to their arrangement, which is not the arrangement to be found in newspaper columns or political speeches. A critic should be sensitive to the particular kind of arrangement—which includes the arrangement into “form”—found in a particular work. Even leaping ahead to “story” or “setting” distorts our actual experience of the work unless we also notice the way the writer has used language to create the illusion of story and the illusion of setting.

12/26/2016

. . .If the effect of most works of metafiction — of “postmodern ”self-reflexivity in general — is to undermine our assumption that fiction offers direct access to reality, the blurring of the line between illusion and the presumably real in Beneath the Coyote Hills suggests that reality itself is often indistinguishable from fiction.

12/10/2016

"If, like me, you feel the obsession with theory over the last forty years has caused many critics to lose sight of the primary purpose of criticism, Daniel Green’s splendid primer returns us to square one. In assured, lucid prose, Green reminds us that a literary work should be analyzed for its own sake, ‘apart from any value it might have as the object of some other discourse or inquiry,’ and that the focus should be on language, not on ‘meaning’ or ideology. For practicing critics, Beyond the Blurb is an excellent refresher course, and for everyone else, Daniel Green demonstrates how to enhance the reading experience."--STEVEN MOORE, AUTHOR OF THE NOVEL: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY